'We can recognize the world in various ways but exact knowledge can be
gained only when we commence with the surfaces of objects' Ladislav Sutnar
(designer, 1930s)

The Lady of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson was published in
1833. Secluded in a tower, the heroine is described as having spent her
days weaving what she saw of the world as it passed on the riverbank below
her window, cursed to see it only as reflected in a mirror. One day Sir
Lancelot passed by – his armour 'flamed' and 'sparkled' and 'glitter'd'
and 'burn'd like one burning flame together' and 'His broad clear brow
in sunlight glow'd' – and unable to resist such a sight she turned
and looked directly down at him. At that moment the curse was played out,
'The mirror crack'd from side to side', and the Lady of Shalott soon after
died.1

Written at the end of the Romantic period, the poem reveals an ambivalent
attitude towards the everyday material world. Though the Lady of Shalott
was punished with death for not being able to resist the pull of the carnal
over the world of the imagination, as Tennyson suggests, the price may
not have been too high compared with a life only experienced indirectly.
It was into this world that photography was born. In the autumn of 1833,
William Henry Fox Talbot was enjoying his honeymoon on the shores of Lake
Como, though frustrated by his woeful sketching skills. As Talbot later
wrote, he 'found that the faithless pencil had only left traces on the
paper melancholy to behold'.2

Talbot was a distinguished scholar and scientist, interested in language,
mathematics, botany and optics, and it has been pointed out that in an
era when scientific observation was blooming, his inability to draw 'threatened
his very status as an accomplished gentleman scientist'. Like Thomas Wedgwood
at the turn of the century, Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s
and Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre working at the same time in Paris,
Talbot became intrigued by the possibility of overcoming this shortcoming
by chemically fixing an image onto a surface.

William Henry Fox Talbot 'Articles of glass'
1844–46 salted paper photograph from a calotype negative Collection of the National Gallery of Australia more detail

Working from mid 1834 in semi-hermetic isolation at Lacock Abbey, his
home in Wiltshire, Talbot made rapid advances. Following on the results
of scientific research which had established that silver salts are particularly
sensitive to light, by autumn he had achieved lasting likenesses through
placing objects onto sensitised paper, exposing them to sunlight and then
fixing the paper. By the summer of the following year he could produce
an image in a camera – small boxes that were within the family affectionately
referred to as his 'mousetraps'.

Daguerre's success in inventing a process capable of producing a fixed
image, a process which would become known as the daguerreotype, was announced
to the world by the physicist and astronomer François Arago on
7 January of 1839 at the Académie des Science in Paris though the
details of the process were not known until August.

Not knowing exactly what Daguerre had invented, Talbot rushed to bring
the results of his experiments before the public: on 25 January he exhibited
what he termed 'photogenic drawings' at the Royal Institution in London
and at the end of the month his paper on the new art was presented to
the Royal Society. He then went back to work. By September of the following
year his process had been perfected and he patented the process in February
1841. It was based on the creation of what he called a calotype, from
a Greek root meaning beautiful, a paper negative which could then be used
multiple times to make a positive image.

The daguerreotype was admired for the beauty of its mirror-like surface
of polished silver but it was a one-off process: the great advantage of
Talbot's method over that of Daguerre was its reproducibility. As an author
of three books and over thirty scientific and mathematical papers, Talbot
was intrigued by the possibility of his images being used as illustration.
In 1843 Nicolaas Henneman, a former valet of Talbot's, was put in charge
of the Reading Establishment, a company set up to produce photographic
prints. Between 1844 and 1847 it is estimated that over 50,000 prints
were produced and it was there that prints were made for The pencil
of nature, the first commercially available book with photographic
illustrations.4

William Henry Fox Talbot 'Articles of china' 1844–46 salted paper photograph
from a calotype negative Collection of the National Gallery of Australiamore detail

The pencil of nature was published between June 1844 and April
1846 in six fascicles or parts. One of the few surviving copies is in
the Gallery's collection.5
Its purpose was to familiarise the public with the various practical uses
of photography. Plate III (Articles of china) shows china on four
shelves – vases, cups and saucers, figurines, covered tureens and
bowls. In the grounds of Lacock Abbey, temporary shelves with a backdrop
of black velvet were set up to support arrangements of objects relocated
from inside: he also made a print of glass objects, featuring three rows
of sparkling glasses, glass decanters and a glass bowl.

Both images are sensitively portrayed with an eye to balance and harmony,
and both reveal the medium ability to capture the nuances of light. It
was not possible given the technical limitations of the process to photograph
glass and china together: Talbot tells the reader in the text accompanying
plate IV (Articles of glass) that glass objects 'impress the sensitive
paper with a very peculiar touch', and that light reflected off white
china is much brighter and therefore needs less exposure time than glass.

Through extended family Talbot was connected to some of the wealthiest
aristocrats in England and had travelled extensively in Europe since early
childhood. As such he would have been acquainted with some of the world's
finest art collections, both at home and abroad, and studies that read
symbolic meaning based on historical sources in painting and literature
into the objects in many of his photographs are convincing.6

The singular emphasis in others on objects, divested of a story, is all
the more remarkable for this reason. In the text of The pencil of nature,
Talbot emphasised the mechanical nature of photography envisaging, as
has been argued by historian Steve Edwards, 'an apparatus that would eradicate
the amateur's need for even a modicum of skill'.7 The images chosen for The pencil
of nature often privilege the inventorial, ordered masculine world
of observation and scientific classification, with the objects taken out
of context, and photographed in regimented rows. They are in marked contrast
to other images that Talbot made of objects shown in their domestic setting
such as tables laid for breakfast with the everyday objects he found around
him; images that speak strongly of life at Lacock and the feminine influence
in that world of his mother Lady Elizabeth, his wife Constance and his
three daughters.8

This question as to whether the act of taking photographs should be seen
as creative and linked to the imagination or regarded as a mechanical
and analytical form of representation characterised, if taken to its extreme,
as purely manual labour is one that would cast a far-reaching shadow over
the subsequent history of photography. Born and raised in the Romantic
era, Talbot's photographs revel in the world of the imagination. In amazement
at his own discovery, Talbot envisages that photographers will be able
to compete with 'artists of reputation' and 'perhaps not infrequently
to excel them in the truth and fidelity of their delineations, and even
in their pictorial effect; since the photographic process when well executed
give effects of light and shade which have been compared to Rembrandt
himself'.9 But these representations also look
forward, as the quote suggests, to the Victorian age of positivism and
the desire to classify and describe the world as accurately as possible.

This tension and interplay between photography's mechanical nature as
a recording device, and its ability to create magic worlds is one of the
fascinating aspects of this art form. Essentially what photography does
is chemically fix on light-sensitive material the traces of light reflected
off objects or people in the world and passed through the camera's 'eye'
– the lens – an analogy made by Talbot in the text to plate
III of The pencil of nature10
and by later photographers like Heinz Hajek-Halke who, in his image called
Optics, holds up a lens in place of his eye.

It is entirely to be expected that the sensual nature of the surface
of objects is a crucial (almost unavoidable) element in so many photographs
made since photography's invention in the 1830s. Its power, its raison
d'être even, is the fact that the camera records things in the real
world in real time. This authentic relationship with reality as opposed
to a symbolic one gives photography a nostalgic edge: for if we look at
something that existed in time but which exists no more then photography
has to function as a memento mori.11 It is true that in a lot of documentary photography,
particularly our everyday snapshots, it is the subject matter that is
of most importance. As the critic Régis Durand has written: 'many
photographs (perhaps most) ask no more of us than that we bask in the
serene contemplation of the represented object in its indisputable presence'.12

Annie W Brigman 'The
bubble' 1909 photogravure from an original negative
Collection of the National Gallery of Australiamore detail

In most of the photographs in this exhibition, however, the focus shifts
to how the photographer sees and how the camera records phenomena. It
has become almost a cliché of photographic history that what is
of most interest to photographers is light. And since its invention in
ancient times, glass has been regarded as almost as magic a medium as
light. Its chaotic molecules are not held together in rigid crystalline
form: glass is a kind of solid liquid.13

The mysterious qualities of glass are explored by many of the photographers
in this exhibition. Glass can seem to mysteriously emit light rather than
merely refract and reflect it. Its translucence can make it seem like
a substance halfway between the material plane and a spiritual one. Nearly
every culture has practised that of scrying, of staring into glass or
dark mirrors, crystals or water to tell fortunes, to see what was usually
hidden – to speculate comes from the same root as speculum,
the Latin word for mirror.

A meditative, other-worldly quality associated with glass was explored
by many of the photographers whose images appeared in Camera work,
Alfred Stieglitz's seminal journal of pictorialist photography published
between 1903 and 1917, as demonstrated in the delicately nuanced Drops
of rain 1908 by Clarence H White showing one of his sons staring into
a large globe in front of a rain-flecked window. An unearthly quality
infuses the material world in many of the images included in Camera
work: Baron Adolf de Meyer's still lifes shimmer in a light that places
them somewhere between existence and non-existence. Similarly, an allegorical
world in which 'gnomes and elves and spirits of the rocks & trees
reveal themselves under certain mystical incarnations' is depicted by
Anne W Brigman.14

Such mysterious moods are not confined to pictorialist photographers.
Aleksandr Rodchenko, a leading modernist who was part of the constructivist
movement in Moscow, suffuses his 1935 portrait of Varvara, his daughter,
lost in thought, her head resting on the table behind a vase of flowers,
with a melancholic mood. Strange worlds of intrigue are also created by
Jan Groover, whose still life objects removed from their everyday function,
are arranged in impenetrable configurations.15
Looking at her works conjures up the words of the Surrealist poet and
critic André Breton: 'often the simplest objects are the most enigmatic'.16

Through using mirrors and other reflective surfaces and printing the
images slightly larger than life-size, she creates disjunctions that raise
questions about photography. Groover challenges our approach to reading
and interpreting images, inserting meanings referenced from daily life
and exploring the way we relate to the objects in photographs as if they
are real. It is a self-referencing world that Groover creates; she has
said that 'a photograph must be understood as representing no more than
its own activity'.

Photographers between the two world wars often chose to focus on the
association of glass with modernity. Both glass and china became favourite
vehicles through which to celebrate the possibilities of mass production.
In the 1930s there were few progressive photographers unaware of Albert
Renger-Patzsch's 1928 book Die Welt ist Schön [The world
is beautiful] which just as appropriately had been originally titled
by him Die Dinge [Things], a book in which the precepts
of what became known as the Neue Sachlichkeit or new objectivity movement
were laid down: recommending that things both industrial and natural be
removed from their original functional context and subjected 'to an aestheticism
based on this new idealisation of the object..17

It was a style based on geometry, employing working methods such as unusual
camera angles, repetition and reflection, that was ultimately aimed at
creating new ways of seeing. It found especially potent expression in
photographs made at the Bauhaus, the famous German design school, by people
such as the architect Hannes Meyer.

Other modernist photographers and teachers include the Swiss-born artist
Hans Finsler who was based in Halle, Piet Zwart from Amsterdam (who was
at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the late 1920s) and Elsa Neuländer-Simon,
working commercially under the name of Yva in Berlin in the 1930s. They
produced images that were free of narrative, and that celebrated the essential
nature of objects. The movement also profoundly shaped the style of advertisements
reproduced in the high quality women’s magazines such as Vanity
Fair and Vogue featuring work by Baron de Meyer, Paul Outerbridge,
Harold Haliday Costain, and Hi Williams: photographers, whose still lifes
of stylised glittering worlds of glass and shining china created the promise
of sophistication and opulence.

The clean lines of modern design are the subject of Josef Sudek's images
of the Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar's chinaware made for an advertisement
campaign between 1928 and 1936. There is an interesting relationship here
between the desire to be objective, to regiment the objects with a military-like
precision, and the ultimate inability to suppress a subjective, sensual
appreciation of the world.

The architecture of the international style, created by visionaries like
Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer, found its ultimate
expression in the towering glass and metal skyscrapers of New York. It
is architecture that allows no hidden shadowy murkiness and dark corners,
highlighting that modern life in the 20th century was to be
carried out in public. Modern cities are by definition full of large plate-glass
shop windows and skyward-reaching glass and metal office buildings. Many
photographers have been fascinated to the point of obsession with the
city manifested as a confusing even exhilarating palimpsest of impressions
through reflection in windows.

Lisette Model, arriving in the United States from Paris in 1938, created
a large series of reflections in shop windows in New York which play with
startling shifts of scale, capturing a sense of the overwhelming experience
in which the photographer's viewpoint is often ambiguous. They are an
insightful social comment on notions of glamour and the preoccupation
with image that she found in America. As Ann Thomas says of Model, 'she
was attracted to the play of light and form as an abstract phenomenon
as much as she was to the content of the windows'.18

Many others, such as Lewis Morley photographing the artist and playwright
Terence Greer outside Gare St Lazare in Paris in 1962, have used reflections
as a playful and intriguing compositional device: here the cups and saucers
on a café table are reflected in Greer's sunglasses. Other photographers
have also employed the mirror as a device that adds complexity and even
confusion to the image: Saul Leiter's Reflection is an example
of this, in which the composition is so convoluted that it is difficult
to discern what is reflected and how all the parts relate to each other.

Artists' fascination with reflections in glass or in mirrors is not new:
it is found throughout cultures from ancient times and, famously, in the
work of painters such as Jan Van Eyck, Velazquez and Manet that have engendered
great debate over their meaning.19
Considering the magical aspect of mirrors, it is not surprising that the
words miracle and mirror come from the same linguistic root. The conceit
that a mirror is magical in some way, that what we see in the mirror is
another world rather than a reflection of this one, is an idea that appealed
in particular to the photographer Brassaï and one that he explored
in his images of Paris at night.

In A couple getting dressed for the Bal des Quat'z Arts of around
1931, the male figure is not visible in the foreground, but appears behind
the woman in the reflection: a trick of the photographer who here plays
the role of magician. Fellow Hungarian photographer André Kertész,
reunited with his glass plate negatives in the 1970s after abandoning
them when fleeing the Second World War, found that most had broken. He
decided to print one in its broken state. A view out his window in Paris
in 1929 is, forty years later, transformed into a confronting image, suggesting
that beyond appearance there may not be another world but merely oblivion.

The absence of the photographer in the large photographs of Venetian
mirrors by the French artist Valérie Belin creates an unsettling
mood: they have been called 'fleshless reflections'.20 The extraordinarily extravagant Venetian mirrors
show mirrors within mirrors. The tight framing of the shots, cut away
from any context, combine with the overladen, glittering scenes to lend
these images an obsessive beauty. They are vanitas pieces, meditations
in the most traditional philosophical sense on the meaninglessness of
material covetousness and the ultimate reality of death.

The viewer is sucked into the reflections which seem to proliferate endlessly
but, ultimately, end up in blackness – it is into a frightening
emptiness into which the viewer peers. The works also explore the nature
of the substance which makes up the physical world and the role and nature
of photography, as critic Régis Durand writes: 'photography is
but the fixation on a sensitive surface of light reflected by certain
bodies; and as in all truly strong works, there is in the photography
of Valérie Belin an exceptional encounter between the objects she
selects and the logic of the medium'.21

The way that mirrors are used by artists as well as writers including
(to name but a few) Dante, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde; and filmmakers
Jean Cocteau and Orson Welles is often widely divergent and complex. On
the one hand, the mirror is closely connected with the notion of self-appraisal
and correction and indeed, as Balthazar Gracian suggested in the 1600s,
'he who cannot see himself might as well not exist', a notion that
is carried out to its logical conclusion in Belin’s mirror images.22

There is also the long tradition of mirrors representing vanity: to look
too intensely at oneself is to risk falling into the trap of self-love.
In the area of self-portraiture, the camera freed the artist from the
necessity of looking in the mirror. And yet paradoxically photography
is full of examples of photographers using mirrors in order to make self-portraits.
This often adds a self-reflective quality to the image. The creator of
the image becomes part of the image, often with camera, as seen in the
self-portraits made by Ilse Bing and Lee Friedlander. There is a voyeuristic
thrill in seeing the creator of the image, and of being privileged to
view what is usually outside the frame, through seeing what is behind
instead of just in front of the camera.

Clarence H White 'Drops of rain' 1903 from 'Camerawork' photogravure off an original negative Collection of the National Gallery of Australia more detail

There is no doubt that photography has profoundly shifted the way that
we perceive the world. As it did for the Lady of Shalott, the sensual
appeal of objects in the real world has proved irresistible to photographers,
beginning with the experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot at the very
birth of photography and finding expression in practitioners of widely
differing outlooks and goals. Photographed objects acquire an aura by
being taken from their casual, often overlooked, position and put under
intense scrutiny. The mechanical tool which should look upon the world
dispassionately is capable of creating images, filtered through the imagination,
which compellingly engage the viewer's imagination and emotions.

Anne O'Hehir
Assistant Curator, Photography

1The poetical
works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, London, New York and Melbourne: Ward,
Lock & Co., n.d., pp.53–58.2 WH Fox Talbot,
'Brief historical sketch of the invention of the art', The pencil of
nature, London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1844, n.p.3 Larry J Schaaf,
'"A wonderful illustration of modern necromancy": Significant
Talbot experimental prints in the J Paul Getty Museum', Photography:
discovery and invention, Malibu, California: The J Paul Getty Museum,
1990, p.31.4 Mike Gray, 'William
Henry Fox Talbot, 1800–77', Specimens and marvels: William Henry
Fox Talbot and the invention of photography, New York: Aperture, 2000,
p.78.5 See Larry J Schaaf,
'Henry Fox Talbot's The pencil of nature: a revised census of original
copies', History of photography, vol.17, no.4, Winter 1993, pp.388–96.6 As put forward by Mike Weaver in Henry Fox Talbot: Selected texts and bibliography, Oxford: Clio Press, 1992.7 Steve Edwards,
'The dialectics of skill in Talbot's dream world', History of photography,
vol.26, no.2, Summer 2002, p.113.8 Carol McCusker,
'Silver spoons and crinoline: Domesticity & the "feminine"
in the photographs of William Henry Fox Talbot', First photographs:
William Henry Fox Talbot and the birth of photography, New York: Powerhouse
Books, 2002, pp.17–22.9 Quoted in Estelle
Jussim, 'The royal road to drawing: Fox Talbot and the invention of photography',
The eternal moment: essays on the photographic moment, New York:
Aperture, 1989, p.17.10 '[The camera]
may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees, the object glass is
the eye of the instrument – the sensitive paper may be compared
to the retina.' Statement by WH FoxTalbot to accompany plate III. Articles
of china, in the The pencil of nature, n.p.11 Discussed
by Claudio Marra, 'The awkward identity of the photographic still life'
in Peter Weiermair (ed.), The nature of still life: from Fox Talbot
to the present day, Milan: Electa, 2001, p.25.12 Régis
Durand, 'How to see (photographically)', Fugitive images: from photography
to video, Patrice Petro (ed.), Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1995, p.148.